LITMIR.BIZ

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sixty-eight in number. In the forest of Arden it was said that down to modern times a squirrel might leap from tree to tree for nearly the whole length of Warwickshire.194 The excavation of prehistoric pile-villages in the valley of the Po has shown that long before the rise and probably the foundation of Rome the north of Italy was covered with dense forests of elms, chestnuts, and especially of oaks.195 Archaeology is here confirmed by history; for classical writers contain many references to Italian forests which have now disappeared.196 In Greece the woods of the present day are a mere fraction of those which clothed great tracts in antiquity, and which at a more remote epoch may have spanned the Greek peninsula from sea to sea.197

      From an examination of the Teutonic words for “temple” Grimm has made it probable that amongst the Germans the oldest sanctuaries were natural woods.198 However this may be, tree-worship is well attested for all the great European families of the Aryan stock. Amongst the Celts the oak-worship of the Druids is familiar to every one.199 Sacred groves were common among the ancient Germans, and tree-worship is hardly extinct amongst their descendants at the present day.200 At Upsala, the old religious capital of Sweden, there was a sacred grove in which every tree was regarded as divine.201 Amongst the ancient Prussians (a Slavonian people) the central feature of religion was the reverence for the sacred oaks, of which the chief stood at Romove, tended by a hierarchy of priests who kept up a perpetual fire of oak-wood in the holy grove.202 The Lithuanians were not converted to Christianity till towards the close of the fourteenth century, and amongst them at the date of their conversion the worship of trees was prominent.203 Proofs of the prevalence of tree-worship in ancient Greece and Italy are abundant.204 Nowhere, perhaps, in the ancient world was this antique form of religion better preserved than in the heart of the great metropolis itself. In the Forum, the busy centre of Roman life, the sacred fig-tree of Romulus was worshipped down to the days of the empire, and the withering of its trunk was enough to spread consternation through the city.205 Again, on the slope of the Palatine Hill grew a cornel-tree which was esteemed one of the most sacred objects in Rome. Whenever the tree appeared to a passer-by to be drooping, he set up a hue and cry which was echoed by the people in the street, and soon a crowd might be seen running from all sides with buckets of water, as if (says Plutarch) they were hastening to put out a fire.206

But it is necessary to examine in some detail the notions on which tree-worship is based. To the savage the world in general is animate, and trees are no exception to the rule. He thinks that they have souls like his own and he treats them accordingly. Thus the Wanika in Eastern Africa fancy that every tree and especially every cocoa-nut tree has its spirit: “the destruction of a cocoa-nut tree is regarded as equivalent to matricide, because that tree gives them life and nourishment, as a mother does her child.”207 Siamese monks, believing that there are souls everywhere and that to destroy anything whatever is forcibly to dispossess a soul, will not break a branch of a tree “as they will not break the arm of an innocent person.”208 These monks, of course, are Buddhists. But Buddhist animism is not a philosophical theory. It is simply a common savage dogma incorporated in the system of an historical religion. To suppose with Benfey and others that the theories of animism and transmigration current among rude peoples of Asia are derived from Buddhism is to reverse the facts. Buddhism in this respect borrowed from savagery, not savagery from Buddhism. Again, the Dyaks ascribe souls to trees and do not dare to cut down an old tree. In some places, when an old tree has been blown down, they set it up, smear it with blood, and deck it with flags “to appease the soul of the tree.”209 People in Congo place calabashes of palm-wine at the foot of certain trees for the trees to drink when they are thirsty.210 In India shrubs and trees are formally married to each other or to idols.211 In the North West Provinces of India a marriage ceremony is performed in honour of a newly-planted orchard; a man holding the Salagram represents the bridegroom, and another holding the sacred Tulsi (Ocymum sanctum) represents the bride.212 On Christmas Eve German peasants used to tie fruit-trees together with straw ropes to make them bear fruit, saying that the trees were thus married.213

      In the Moluccas when the clove-trees are in blossom they are treated like pregnant women. No noise must be made near them; no light or fire must be carried past them at night; no one must approach them with his hat on, but must uncover his head. These precautions are observed lest the tree should be frightened and bear no fruit, or should drop its fruit too soon, like the untimely delivery of a woman who has been frightened in her pregnancy.214 So when the paddy (rice) is in bloom the Javanese say it is pregnant and make no noises (fire no guns, etc.) near the field, fearing that if they did so the crop would be all straw and no grain.215 In Orissa, also, growing rice is “considered as a pregnant woman, and the same ceremonies are observed with regard to it as in the case of human females.”216

      Conceived as animate, trees are necessarily supposed to feel injuries done to them. When an oak is being felled “it gives a kind of shriekes or groanes, that may be heard a mile off, as if it were the genius of the oake lamenting. E. Wyld, Esq., hath heard it severall times.”217 The Ojebways “very seldom cut down green or living trees, from the idea that it puts them to pain, and some of their medicine-men profess to have heard the wailing of the trees under the axe.”218 Old peasants in some parts of Austria still believe that forest-trees are animate, and will not allow an incision to be made in the bark without special cause; they have heard from their fathers that the tree feels the cut not less than a wounded man his hurt. In felling a tree they beg its pardon.219 So in Jarkino the woodman craves pardon of the tree he cuts down.220 Again, when a tree is cut it is thought to bleed. Some Indians dare not cut a certain plant, because there comes out a red juice which they take for the blood of the plant.221 In Samoa there was a grove of trees which no one dared cut. Once some strangers tried to do so, but blood flowed from the tree, and the sacrilegious strangers fell ill and died.222 Till 1855 there was a sacred larch-tree at Nauders, in the Tyrol, which was thought to bleed whenever it was cut; moreover the steel was supposed to penetrate the woodman's body to the same depth that it penetrated the tree, and the wound on the tree and on the man's body healed together.223

      Sometimes it is the souls of the dead which are believed to animate the trees. The Dieyerie tribe of South Australia regard as very sacred certain trees, which are supposed to be their fathers transformed; hence they will not cut the trees down, and protest against the settlers doing so.224 Some of the Philippine Islanders believe that the souls of their forefathers are in certain trees, which they therefore spare. If obliged to fell one of these trees they excuse themselves to it by saying that it was the priest who made them fell it.225 In an Annamite story an old fisherman makes an incision in the trunk of a tree which has drifted ashore; but blood flows from the cut, and it appears that an empress with her three daughters, who had been cast into the sea, are embodied in the tree. Скачать книгу